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Welcome to The New Books Network.Hello, and welcome to another episode of The New Books Network podcast.I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Thomas Sojka.
I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Simeon Cola about his new book, Intimate Subjects, Touch and Tangibility in Britain's Cerebral Age, published by the University of Chicago Press in July, 2024.
Sim is a lecturer in liberal arts and history at the University of Bristol.He's a historian of modern Britain and its global entanglements, focusing on the senses, sexuality, and the history of science.
His recent work has traced new experiences and practices of sense in modern Britain, showcasing how changed understandings of selfhood and interpersonal relations.
For his second book project, Within Worlds, Samin is exploring how the bodies and emotions of inhabitants of London's Docklands in the 19th and 20th centuries materialized and modified their connections to distant places.
This is an attempt to write a global history of Britain from the body's point of view.But today, we'll focus on his latest intimate subjects.So firstly, Samin, welcome to the podcast.Thank you for joining us today.
And congratulations on what really is a marvelous book.Thanks for having me. So perhaps as a way of getting started, we can talk a little bit about your inspiration and motivation for writing a book about touch.What got you interested in the subject?
Oh, yeah.So I've kind of pondered this for a few years now.And I think one of the reasons is that I was always attracted to really granular stories in history.I really wanted to get as close as possible to my subjects.
And I think that naturally brought me to thinking about touch and the vicissitudes of everyday life, right? But I think probably a deeper reason is the way in which touch has been represented historically, which always kind of bugged me a bit.
So often it was about regulation and the management of touch.But I think that kind of missed lots of the other aspects of touch.So it's importance as a form of communication or the way that we create knowledge through touch.
but especially the way it's fundamental to our relationships and to our sense of self as well.
So I was really interested in this tension, I guess, between the very human longing for touch, but also how touch is always bound up with power and can be a threat to our autonomy as well.So I guess if there was an overarching question, it was,
How do we live together and apart?And how is that structured by our historically and individually specific experience of touch?So that was always the question that motivated me that I kept thinking about when I was developing the project.
Great.Well, I think that's a great segue to thinking about what sort of methodological approaches do you think you're bringing into this study of touch?And more specifically, why did you choose to focus on what you call Britain's cerebral age?
And maybe we can talk more about how you're deploying D.H.Lawrence's idea of the cerebral age in the book.Yeah, sure.
Well, to start with that, Lawrence wrote some great poems in the early 20th century, which are really about how we've all become too cerebral.So in his understanding, there's so much emphasis on thought, even not just vision, but on thinking.
and it means that we've, in the most literal sense, lost touch.We've kind of been unable to continue to develop relationships with one another.
So Lawrence had this quite kind of utopian, in some ways quite problematic and male understanding of the value of touch as a as a way of communing really with other bodies and people.
So subsequently there's been a bit of critique of him by some really great feminist scholarship but the fundamental understanding is that there's touch is what binds us all together and that in the early 20th century according to Lawrence we were losing our sense of that.
In terms of methods, I think what really interested me was how, I guess, we've often heard these stories about how touch became alienated or we became alienated from one another.
We became, especially in cities in the late 19th and early 20th century, these atomized bodies that somehow just try to protect ourselves by the constant onslaught of stimulation.So if you think of somewhere like
Piccadilly Circus, you know, you've got the big electric lights, it's overwhelming, you've got the traffic roaring around.And so that causes the city dweller to somehow protect themselves and become isolated.
But what interested me was how, in the early 20th century, you begin to see a counter-narrative about how touch functions, which is one which sees the body as emplaced in the world.It's a bit of a tricky concept.
But rather than just thinking about the body as an object in space, people in neurology and psychology began to think of the body as coextensive with space.
And that's an idea that was just about emerging in urology in the early 20th century, but it really kicks off in the mid 20th century with phenomenology, so the philosophy of perception, and much more recently with theories of embodied mind in contemporary neuroscience.
I got really interested in following those methods and tried to apply them to the history of touch.
And that really informs your sort of first chapter, doesn't it?Exactly. Yeah.And I think overall, this is a book about touch, but you do such really rich scene setting throughout the book that it's really a book about the senses beyond touch.
Reading your descriptions of life on the London Underground, for instance, you feel yourself packed into that small space.And I wonder if you can speak a little bit more to your mental state in constructing these sensory descriptions.
Yeah, good question.I suppose I really wanted it to be immersive.You know, I really wanted the reader to imagine themselves in the place of the subjects I was writing about and see it from their perspective.
So, for example, the chapter on tea shops begins with a young woman called Thelma Rogers, who goes to lunch in a tea shop in 1929.And the tea shop is empty.And she sits at a table.
And then someone else, a reverend called Harold Davidson, comes and sit next to her very awkwardly, because the other 49 tables are empty, and begins to talk to her.
And it kind of transpires later that he has a record of inappropriate contact with people in tea shops. But I think in telling that story, I realized that it was really important to know how space was laid out.
So I wanted to know, how were the tables laid out?Where were the pillars?How did you enter and exit the room?Because when you think about the granular differences in space, you begin to understand how the possibilities for touch changed as well.
And it's the same if you think about the underground as well.So the way in which tube cars have changed internally over 100 years, their whole spatial layout has changed.
And that's changed the way that people sit, stand, look at each other, how close they can get to each other. So the scene setting is partly, I guess, it has an ethical reason.
I'm trying to do it from our subject's perspective, but it also has this theoretical reason that you need to understand how space changes to understand how touch works.
And speaking, because you mentioned space, the book also really does a great job of pulling from all these different sub-disciplines, you know, history of medicine, disability studies, sociology, gender, legal studies, and spatial history.
Did you set out to write such an interdisciplinary or, if not interdisciplinary, an interdisciplinary-informed book?
You know, I didn't.And I think probably retrospectively, it took longer as a result of that. But reflecting it, I think there are two reasons for it.The first is that touch relates to all aspects of life.
And so I wanted to do these case studies which showed how the practice and understanding of touch changed in so many different domains.So within history of science, within the history of disability, on public transport.
So that meant that I had to draw on quite a few different fields, including disability studies, feminist philosophy, ethnographies of law.So I was pulled, I guess, in all those different directions.
But then as the project developed, it was also because I wanted to show how through this new method of historicizing touch, so once we begin to think of the body as coextensive with the world and of touch as something which is emerging through everyday practice,
I wanted to show how that history can contribute to contemporary interdisciplinary debates.So debates about disability, about vulnerability in public spaces, about consent and about how science and law are made through our bodies as well.
So it's partly to show the uses of the history of touch as well as just in order to understand it.
And since you've sort of begun to get at some of your case studies, you essentially begin with this relationship between the mind and the body and how it's sort of been conceptualized over time scientifically before moving to a discussion of schools for the blind, then the London Underground, the tea shop.
And I think you really do a great job of incorporating empire sort of savvily into that chapter.We could talk more about that perhaps. And then ending with the discussion of law, police, and fog, sort of this disruptor to potentials for touch, right?
And I'm curious, did any of these begin as sort of the kernel of the project?Did you begin in any one of these spaces in particular as you sort of got the project off the ground?
The kernel of the project began with the chapter on thinking about the mind and the body.Because I wanted to think about how understandings of touch changed.But really, I had to completely rewrite that chapter at the end.
Because as I moved into the other case studies, which are more about everyday life, I realized that actually, how we understand touch emerges through everything we do in everyday life, just through
what is taught in schools or how we sit on a tube station or tube platform.So what was actually more of, I guess, an intellectual history at the beginning for the first chapter
I realized had to be rethought as a story about this triangular relationship between the neurologist, the psychologist and the school teacher, who's the fiance of one of the experimenters.
So ideas about the history of touch in science really should be told as a love story.You know, it shouldn't be told as, you know, these are the publications that that are coming out.
It's really about how their tactile relations with one another in their own personal life informs the experiment.So that was the kernel, but then I had to rethink it at the end.
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Right, this idea of intimacy and you end with tenderness, I think, just runs through the book so deftly.Did you have a particularly surprising archival find as you wrote the book?You know, did anything make you sort of go, oh, oh my God.
or what was perhaps your most exciting anecdote in writing the book?
Oh, that's a great question.I mean, there was this amazing source written by a guy who was, he was being prosecuted.So he was at a police court, which is one of the lowest courts in London.And he had been charged with, I think it was just,
It was one of those very vague charges, which is basically just looking like he was going to commit a crime, but not actually having done it yet.
And in order to defend himself, he created this sketch map which showed his route across the embankment and across one of the bridges in London to a coffee store at four o'clock in the morning.
And then he presented his case in the form of a play, because he'd formerly been a musical artist.
So there's this beautiful little notepad in the police records, which is this kind of flowery notepad, but written as kind of at one at to this, you know, these were my movements throughout the city in the middle of the night.And that kind of
evidence of a 20-something-year-old working class man defending himself in a police court in the 20s through a play and through a map was just phenomenal.But that was after weeks and weeks of going through these very dry minute books.
Well, it sounds like that needs to be brought to the stage sooner rather than later. Now, when you were writing this, I assume it was sort of in the shadow of the pandemic.
And I wonder if this inability to touch or to be close or to be intimate, it informed your writing of this book.
Yeah, completely.I mean, I actually wrote the introduction during one of the lockdowns.And the thing that really struck me during the pandemic was how, in a way similar to Fog, actually, the way that
our experience of our body, which is something which is normally forgotten, you know, we're normally just thinking or using our vision. But our bodily experience suddenly comes to presence.
We're suddenly very attentive to what we touch and what that could mean.So you could almost call the pandemic this kind of a phenomenological rupture.You know, it's suddenly the body comes to presence and we all become hyper attentive.
And actually, there's been some really great stuff by one of my colleagues in Bristol in philosophy on this.So, Javi Carell has written some great stuff on the bodily experience of social distancing.
and how it increased our sense of fear and our risk of touch.But she also develops this great concept of bodily doubt, the way that we lose faith in what our bodies tell us.
We feel out of place and we feel no longer grounded in the way that we would do through our bodies.So while there's a lot of cultural variation in this, actually, it's a pretty shared experience.
So I think that sense of embodied disruption and rupture and feeling out of place, which actually I think is residually with us as well, even though we don't recognize it.
What do you think then that the history of touch in 19th and 20th century Britain can teach us about the world we live in today?
Oh, big question.I think one of the things I'd point to is debates about autonomy and understandings of consent as well.So since the early 20th century, the idea of the body as being
at risk from touch, especially in a gendered way, obviously, develops very strongly in feminist thinking.And the solution to the at-risk body is to develop a sense of autonomy.So to protect yourself from unwanted touch.
And the way of managing that is through consent, the concept of consent. So this is obviously hugely important right now.
And I think that concept has been really interestingly tackled, I guess, by some current feminist philosophers who emphasize the absolute importance of autonomy and of consent, but also not to lose that sense of openness and availability to others as well.
So when we historicize touch, I think it helps us to begin to think critically about the huge advantages, but also what we lose when all the emphasis is on autonomy.And we forget the sense, the other sense of tenderness, which is about
being gentle, about being available to others.So I think the history of touch can also maybe help us to recapture some of those meanings as well, while recognising that touch is always cut across by power inequalities and risk.
But hopefully it can help us to maybe change the balance of the mistrust of touch that is so prevalent now, partly because of the pandemic, but also because of its kind of threat to our sense of self and autonomy.
So you end your fantastic book by talking about this concept of tenderness, which I think is so difficult in an age where so much of our communication is mediated through screens or more of a digital medium.
So I'm curious, what is your recommendation to us as we navigate touch and intimacy and tenderness in the world we live in today then?How do we establish these connections?
That's a difficult question to ask a historian.I think one of the effects, and this goes back to the question about the pandemic, one of the effects of the pandemic was to find small everyday ways of once again bodily grounding ourselves.
so and often those ways were very tangible so they were things like knitting or baking or whatever so it was often doing things with your hands right um so i think that kind of grounded everyday material practice enables a form of reconnection.
It's a difficult one because obviously there's also a flight online, which has happened since the pandemic.And we're having the conversation by Zoom.
But I suppose a different way of answering that question is how tech companies themselves are responding to it.So the field of haptics is
exploding at the moment and we're going way beyond the possibility of just having haptic feedback in phones, for example, to having kind of forms of haptic response in in all kinds of technological life.
So I think this is recognized by tech companies.I think the danger is that its virtual touch is kind of becoming commodified as well.So I don't think that's necessarily the solution.I don't think a more haptic technology is the solution.
I think it's more about a managed withdrawal from the way in which we use screens to mediate everything. But for those lessons, I think, go back two years to the pandemic and think about how we dealt with our bodily disruption then.
Even though lots of people went online, actually lots of people also took themselves offline a lot more as well.
Great.We have a bit of time, so I'm curious, how does your first book connect to your second book then?Would you like to tell us a little bit about what you're working on now?
Sure, yeah.I think with the first book, it's a lot about space.It's about the way in which individuals have these kind of micro-encounters within very small spaces.I think the second book is really about scale.
because you could think sensory history is intrinsically about interpersonal relations within a small space.But how do we tell sensory history from a global perspective?
And how do our bodies and our emotions, how do they inflect and even shape changes that are happening way beyond us? So I think the missing thing or the thing I'm trying to develop more. is the global perspective for embodied experience.
So the new projects are zooming in on the docks of London in the 19th and late 19th, early 20th century.And it's trying to show how the bodies and emotions of those who are living, working and passing through the docks are materializing
but also even modifying ecological, economic, and territorial changes happening way beyond the docks.
So to give some examples, one of the things I've been writing about is the guys who used to unload timber in one of the docks and the ways in which their skeletons became regularly deformed in a very similar way.
And you can tell that story as a story of labor and disability, but it's also a story about the massive expansion of the softwood timber trade, which is also about the advance of industrial forestry practices in Sweden, the way that trees were increasingly cultivated to grow straight, and the wood grain even changed in the trees as a result of these new forestry practices.
and rivers were straightened so you could get the trees out of Sweden quicker and you can get them to the docks quicker.
So there's this kind of dual history, a kind of dual ecological history happening in Sweden, but then the same kind of bodily and emotional history happening in the docks.Or like in another chapter I'm about to start writing, it's about
Italian and Spanish cattlemen who'd been working in Argentina and they came to London on the cattle ships, very, very poor, and they were serially defrauded in this lodging house in Deptford.
And I'm interested in how you can connect this history of fraud and trust with a history of ranching practices in the pampas in Argentina.
You know, how how does the changing practice of livestock farming, the invention of refrigerated technology so you can get the meat over kind of quicker,
how did those changes actually have a real embodied or affective effect on those who were part of that trade and ended up being defrauded in London?I can't give you the answer yet because I haven't.But it's that story of big ecological changes
and capitalist changes as well.It's a history of capitalism, but through the body.And I'm interested really not just in how bodies and emotions are inflecting these global changes, but also as a result, how they shape, how we perceive the world.
So basically what we want, who we trust, what we believe ourselves capable of, all of those are shaped by the changes in our bodies and the changes in our affects, which are consequent on these massive changes in commodity chains and farming elsewhere.
That's so fascinating.I mean, it reminds me a lot of Virginia Woolf's essay in the London scene about London Docklands, in which she sort of meanders around and encounters the sort of vastness that the London Docklands are dealing with.
Exactly.I mean, that's a real inspiration where she writes about how
I can't remember why example size, things like the billiard ball or the walking stick and how this thing in your hand actually is a kind of congealment of, you know, so much labor time, so much work and technology, which has happened thousands of miles away.
But obviously for her, it's about the commodity capturing that.But for me, it's about the body itself and how how the bodies of those who are living and working are, in a way, a metric, I guess, of these global changes.
Well, I certainly look forward to it.But in the meantime, Intimate Subjects is out now, available where all fine books are sold, presumably, and some less fine books as well.
But I encourage everyone to get their hands on this marvelous and important book in British studies.So thank you again, Dr. Cola, for joining us. and we look forward to your next project.
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